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Keeper of the Canon

Since it first appeared in 1962, "The Norton Anthology of English Literature" has remained the sine qua non of college textbooks, setting the agenda for the study of English literature in this country and beyond. Its editor, therefore, holds one of the most powerful posts in the world of letters, and is symbolically seen as arbiter of the canon.

With the publication of the anthology's newest edition this month, Norton is marking a significant generational shift: after more than 40 years as founding and general editor, M. H. Abrams, a leading scholar of Romanticism, is handing the reins over to Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar and Harvard professor.

Although assailed by some for being too canonical and by others for faddishly expanding the reading list, the anthology has prevailed over the years, due in large part to the talents of Abrams, who refined the art of stuffing 13 centuries of literature into 6,000-odd pages of wispy cigarette paper. It's a zero-sum game; for everything that was added, something else had to come out. "It's important not to let the anthology become institutionalized, or a monument," Abrams said in a recent conversation about his life and work. "It has to be a living, growing thing."

In half a century at Cornell University, Abrams, who is 93, never tired of teaching the introductory English survey. But he's also a renowned scholar whose 1953 book, "The Mirror and the Lamp," is a classic. Hailed for its lucid analysis of the origins and impact of Romantic philosophy, it elevated and in many ways legitimized the study of Romantic poetry in this country. His "Natural Supernaturalism" (1971), about Romanticism's connection to the social and political changes of the 19th century, is also very well regarded.

For a devotee of Romanticism, with its moody Sturm und Drang, Abrams is remarkably cheery and even-keeled. The child of Russian Jewish immigrants, he grew up in Long Branch, N.J., and won a scholarship to Harvard in 1930, at a time when few Jews were admitted. He said he wasn't aware of bias "except in a vague way" and "took it for granted" that there were very few Jews on the faculty. Becoming a professor "was a doubly bold move in light of the Depression and the fact I was Jewish," he said. "I thought, as long I was going to starve . . . I'd starve doing something I enjoyed."

After Harvard, Abrams won a scholarship to Cambridge University and studied with I. A. Richards, the critic and founder of the New Criticism, which emphasized close readings of works of literature over preoccupation with the author's biographical or cultural context. "I learned a lot from the New Criticism, how to talk intelligently and pointedly about the particularities of the poem," Abrams said. "But I never fell for the noncontextual reading, I always felt it was important to look at poets in history."

After the war, when universities began hiring again, Abrams landed a position at Cornell, where over the years his students included the novelist Thomas Pynchon and the literary scholar Harold Bloom. Abrams recalled that Pynchon had written a "brilliant" essay on Samuel Johnson's "Rasselas" and Voltaire's "Candide." "I was sure it was plagiarized. It was so sophisticated, so polished," he said. But when he spoke with Pynchon, it quickly became clear he was indeed the author. "I've always kicked myself for not keeping a copy of that paper."

Bloom was "fearsome" as an undergraduate, but also "gifted beyond anybody I'd ever seen," Abrams said. "He had that extraordinary ability to read a book almost as fast as you can turn the pages, not only to read it but to practically memorize it." Abrams encouraged Bloom, then a socially awkward, shy 17-year-old. "He told me that . . . I need not fear that my gifts would be neglected always, because, as he gently put it, 'You have a very strong personality,' " Bloom said with a laugh in a recent telephone interview.

Bloom went on to write "The Anxiety of Influence" (1973), in which he argued that authors must essentially destroy their forebears to create new work. "He continuously claims me as his intellectual father and calls his students my intellectual grandchildren. Harold is strongly Oedipal in his theory," Abrams said. "It is a precarious position to be in, I suppose."

In 1956, Norton asked Abrams to oversee a group of editors for an anthology of English literature, from its Anglo-Saxon origins to the present, aimed at survey courses. He readily accepted. "I was a strong believer in the importance of that approach to English literature for young students," Abrams said.

The anthology's encyclopedic breadth and accessibility -- and the fact it wasn't tied to a particular critical theory -- made it an instant hit. Norton had already published anthologies of American and world literature, but English literature "made us peerless among publishers of literature anthologies," said Donald Lamm, a former president of Norton. It remains Norton's top-selling anthology, with eight million copies in print since 1962. The latest edition sells for around $60. To update each new edition, every six years or so, the editors consulted reader surveys distributed to several hundred professors, who checked off which works they taught most often.

When Norton asked Greenblatt -- who was already editor of "The Norton Shakespeare" -- to join the team as Abrams's deputy in the mid-90's, Abrams said he was initially skeptical because of their different critical approaches, but quickly came around. The two had first met in the 80's, when they once delivered opposing lectures. "It was great fun," Abrams said. "He always claimed that I bent his sword. I always claimed he had the better, not of the argument, but of the rhetoric of the argument."

The argument continued into the latest edition of the anthology. Abrams said he had been "more reluctant" than Greenblatt to drop "some of the classic writers who'd long been canonical, and reduce their scale to make room for other writers." Greenblatt concedes there was friendly friction. "He often laments great patches of the stuff we're taking out with such a poignant pleasure." Indeed, for the newest edition, they scaled back on the Romantic poets to make space for more Modernism and Gothic literature.

In its editorial choices, Norton says it has responded to changes in the academy, rather than dictated them. The seventh edition, which was published in 1999 and was the first Greenblatt worked on, was "an important shift," said Julia Reidhead, a vice president and editor at Norton. Because "tastes in the classroom were shifting," she said, Norton chose to "open up the canon" and include more postcolonial writers and women, as its main competitor, "The Longman Anthology of British Literature," published by Pearson, had done.

Competing anthologists haven't been as successful as Norton. In the 60's, Harcourt asked the critic Northrop Frye to develop an anthology, but it never got off the ground. The story goes that Frye jokingly named it "Burnt Norton," a sly nod to one of T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." In the 70's, Bloom and Lionel Trilling edited "The Oxford Anthology of English Literature," but it never displaced the Norton. "We were defeated in battle," Bloom said.

"The Norton Anthology of American Literature" has similarly remained more canonical while its main competitor today, "The Heath Anthology of American Literature," published by Houghton Mifflin, is decidedly more oriented to cultural studies. The Heath, for instance, gives less space to the great poet Elizabeth Bishop than it does to a "prison literature" section that includes works by Kathy Boudin, a former member of the Weather Underground who served more than 20 years for her role in a 1981 robbery and murder.

This reflects a trend in English curriculums toward the contemporary and the political. To Greenblatt's dismay, that often comes at the expense of a deeper historical grounding. If English departments stop offering survey courses, they don't have to pay to hire professors with the breadth necessary to teach them. "You can see why deans might find that attractive," Greenblatt said. For his part, Abrams remains a great defender of the survey. "I don't think it's dispensable," he said. "It's always fresh, always fun to teach. It keeps you in touch with everything. It inhibits your becoming narrow and specialized. It's a great thing for students and also for teachers."